Works-In-Progress, April 29th

As we get closer to the deadline for final art (Just a few weeks away now!), all the fantastic WIPs have been pouring in. Everyone’s ideas are starting to come to life and there is a beautiful assortment of colors, styles and themes!

A soucouyant is a wrinkled old hag by day who rips her skin off at night to become a monstrous flaming creature who sucks the blood from her victims. Here, Ryan walks us through some of the process he went through in designing his illustration.

Dominick is illustrating a creature of his own design, a feathered serpent that slithers through the clouds. He began with reference gathering, looking at african vipers for their feathered scales and Aztec head dresses. Then he moved on to thumbnails and vibrant color studies of the creature and clouds.

Matthew decided pretty early on that he wanted to illustrate a werewolf for the book and got right to work thumbnailing compositions and drawing pose studies. After settling on the composition he liked best, he has begun the process of refining and tweaking the perspective and visual flow of the image.

Nick is also designing his own original creature, focusing on scale with his creature design and composition to showcase the enormous size of his creatures. With some pretty clear ideas of the type of scene he wanted to illustrate, he settled quickly on the general composition and has been working on refining the sense of depth, movement and scale. He has also been working on color comps to find the best choice for color palette.

As we saw in previous WIPs, Magali has based her original creature design on an octopus and really worked to push the shape language to make it feel new and alien. She did many, many (did I say many?) thumbnails, finding all sorts of interesting ways she could reveal this creature to the divers and viewer. After choosing between so many great thumbnails, she made it down to one composition she preferred and began work on refining it.